As Enrollment Slips, Alternative Colleges Ask: Is There Room for Us?

AMHERST, Mass. — The office of the Hampshire College president, Miriam Nelson, looked as if she were hosting a big sleepover earlier this month, with sleeping bags everywhere and students sprawled in chairs using laptops, their towels hanging in the president’s private bathroom. But Dr. Nelson and her staff had long left the premises.

The students who had taken over her office were a conscious throwback to the activism of the 1960s, when Hampshire was conceived as an experiment in high...